In the
Titanic
’s wireless cabin, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride remained cheerful and optimistic. Jack continued to send ‘CQD’s alerting all ships within range, and occasionally, almost as a joke, he tapped out an ‘SOS’. Harold said later that he had suggested, tongue in cheek, that it might be their last chance to try out the official international distress call which, originating as it did in Germany, they preferred to ignore. They sent the first ‘SOS’ to their sister ship, the
Olympic
, which was five hundred miles away en route to Southampton.
From time to time Jack went out on deck to see what was happening, and at last it became clear to him that the
Titanic
was sinking. Just before 1.30 a.m. he sent a message that women and children were being put into lifeboats. A few minutes later he reported that the ship’s engine rooms were flooding. Their distress calls were silenced for a few minutes when a crew member came into the wireless cabin and tried to wrest Jack’s lifejacket from him. Harold got hold of the man and Jack punched him senseless.
As the
Titanic
’s power began to fail the
Carpathia
lost touch with her. The last message came at around 1.45 a.m., telling Cottam that the engine room was full to the boilers. Captain Smith put his head into the wireless cabin to say it was now every man for himself, but Jack and Harold kept on sending until all power was gone. Only then did they make a dash for the deck. It was 2.17 a.m., and the
Titanic
was on the point of going down. Harold jumped
first, and managed to cling on to an overturned ‘collapsible’ lifeboat. Jack jumped, but Harold did not see where he landed.
At 2.45 a.m. the lookouts on the
Carpathia
saw what they believed to be a green flare in the distance, and the liner made towards it. But fifty minutes later they had seen no sign of a ship, nor any lifeboats. Dawn began to break around 4 a.m., and Captain Rostron cut the
Carpathia
’s engines, as he was certain he was now close to the scene of the disaster. Another green flare went up, and they saw their first lifeboat just a hundred yards away. Carefully Captain Rostron manoeuvred his ship to bring the lifeboat alongside, to the lee side of a light wind which was beginning to stir the sea. This was not easy, for they were in the midst of a huge floe of icebergs. Among the first twenty-five survivors taken in stunned silence on board the
Carpathia
was the
Titanic
’s fourth officer, twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Boxall, who confirmed what Rostron feared. The
Titanic
had disappeared at 2.30 a.m.
It took six hours for the
Carpathia
to find and rescue a little over seven hundred survivors.
14
A few of those taken aboard were dead of exposure, among them Jack Phillips. Harold Bride was just hanging on to life: he had spent hours lying on the upturned lifeboat. A doctor bandaged his feet, which were frozen from the icy water. Harold Cottam, who had been about to catch up on his sleep when the first ‘CQD’ sent him running in shirt and trousers to the bridge, was still at the Morse key eight and a half hours later. He was exhausted, but he still had work to do. When Captain Rostron had satisfied himself that there could be no more survivors, he had Cottam tap out messages to other ships on their way to the rescue that there was no need for them. The
Carpathia
, bobbing amongst the icebergs which in daylight presented an awesome spectacle, now had the grim task of searching for the dead. One officer counted no fewer than twenty-five bergs rising 150 to two
hundred feet above the water, and many other smaller ‘bergy bits’.
Captain Rostron considered his options. It was suggested that the survivors might be taken on board the
Olympic
, which had turned about and was covering the five hundred miles to the scene of the disaster. But Rostron felt that a transfer of survivors at sea in small boats, which would have to be rowed amongst the icebergs, would be too traumatic. The
Carpathia
began cautiously to steer a way out of the ice floe, and headed back to New York.
40
After the
Titanic
H
arold Cottam’s first messages telling of the disaster which had befallen the
Titanic
had to be relayed to coastal stations via the much more powerful transmitter on the
Olympic
. The world was desperate for news of the fate of the ‘unsinkable’
Titanic
, but Cottam was near to collapse, and able to give only the barest details. When the
Olympic
’s operators asked if there was anything he wanted to say to New York, he tapped back: ‘I have not eaten since 5.30 pm yesterday.’ A list of survivors had been drawn up, and Cottam began to send their names, but as night fell he was so exhausted he could barely press the Morse key.
Two officers reported to Captain Rostron that Cottam was ‘acting queer’. Rather than hold the world in suspense, Rostron asked Harold Bride if he would take over, so that Cottam could get some sleep. Bride, his feet heavily bandaged, was carried to the wireless cabin and began once again to work the key. Like Cottam, he was instructed to send only ‘disaster related messages’. The two men took that to mean that they should concentrate on the long list of the names of the survivors, and should refuse requests from newspapers for more details of the tragedy. The silence of the
Carpathia
on the most sensational story for many years angered the American press, and rumours sprang up that Bride and Cottam had been instructed to hang on to their testimony so they could sell their accounts exclusively when they arrived in New York.
So urgent was the demand for news that US President William Taft sent out two US Navy scout cruisers which had a wireless range of 150 miles to intercept the
Carpathia
and gather some information ahead of the liner’s arrival in New York. But the Navy operators were rebuffed by Bride and Cottam who, as Marconi men, regarded themselves as being in a different league when it came to tapping a Morse key. To confuse matters further, American Morse code at the time was not quite the same as the Continental version used by Marconi operators. For example, the three dashes of the letter ‘O’ in Marconi Morse spelled the number ‘five’ in US Morse, so that the ‘SOS’ signal used on the Great Lakes was ‘S5S’. Harold Bride later told a
New York Times
reporter: ‘The navy operators aboard the scout cruisers were a great nuisance. I advise them all to learn the Continental Morse and learn to speed up in it if they ever expect to be worth their salt.’ He said the Navy operators were ‘as slow as Christmas coming’.
To add to the frustration and confusion, the first reports of the fate of the
Titanic
had been garbled when the ‘CQD’s from Jack Phillips criss-crossed with wireless messages from other ships. Somehow newspapers got hold of a story that the damaged liner was being towed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and that all the passengers were safe. It was never discovered how this cruel raising of hopes had occurred, but the finger of suspicion was pointed at the hundreds of wireless amateurs listening in to the unfolding drama from their attic rooms on the eastern seaboard of America. Questions would also be asked about the attitude of American Marconi operators, but Guglielmo Marconi himself was instantly identified as the saviour of the
Titanic
survivors. When the
Carpathia
was still two days out from New York he wrote to Bea: ‘Everyone seems so grateful to wireless - I can’t go about New York without being mobbed and cheered - worse than Italy.’
The intense public attention made Marconi reluctant to go down to the Cunard pier to meet the
Carpathia
when she arrived on the evening of 18 April. Instead he dined at the home of John Bottomley, managing director of the American Marconi Company.
But the
New York Times
would not let him be. A reporter knocked on the door of Bottomley’s home at 254 West 132nd Street at 10.30 p.m. asking for written permission to interview Bride and Cottam. Marconi decided to go with the reporter, and they took the Ninth Avenue elevated railway down to 14th Street. An anxious crowd swarmed out of the train, carrying Marconi and the reporter with them. A cab was waiting to take them to the Cunard pier, where thousands had gathered to greet the
Carpathia
. In the crush Marconi was not recognised, and he had to talk his way past a series of guards before he could board the liner. He waited until all the survivors had been taken off, then made for the wireless cabin. Milking every drop of sentiment, the
Times
reporter who went with him described the scene:
He almost ran forward and threw back the door of a tiny cabin. One lamp was burning in it. A young man’s back was turned to him, and between two points of brass a blue flame leaped incessantly. Slowly the youth turned his head around, still working the key. The hair was long and black and the eyes in the semi-darkness were large - staringly large. The face was small and rather spiritual, one which might be expected in a painting. It was clear that from the first tragic moment the boy had known no relief. ‘Hardly worth sending now, boy,’ said Mr. Marconi, hoping to cause the youth to stop. ‘But these poor people. They expect their messages to go.’ And the operator, Harold Bride, caught Mr. Marconi’s face and saw his hand extended. ‘He recognised the man who discovered the wireless system, although he had never seen him before. He glanced from Mr. Marconi to a little picture above the wireless instrument. It was a picture of Marconi. They shook hands long and without saying a word. The boy’s face changed in expression gradually. The strain of his long work was just beginning to break, and he smiled. ‘You know, Mr. Marconi, Phillips is dead,’ were his first
words. Mr. Marconi asked the operator how his feet were. Both were in bandages and he was working seated on the edge of his bed. A plate of food at his side told how he had eaten. ‘I haven’t been out of the cabin,’ he said, ‘since the night after the Titanic went down.’
An ambulance which had arrived to take Bride to hospital waited while Marconi heard the story of the disaster. On 19 April the
New York Times
declared in an editorial: ‘If Guglielmo Marconi were not one of the most modest of men, as well as of great men, we would have heard something, possibly much, from him as to the emotions he must have felt when he went down to the Cunard wharf, Thursday night, and saw coming off the
Carpathia
, hundred after hundred, the survivors of the
Titanic
, every one of whom owed life itself to his knowledge as a scientist and his genius as an inventor.’
However, while the Americans were full of praise for wireless telegraphy, they were deeply unhappy about the way it had developed in the United States. Wireless’s role in the
Titanic
tragedy caught the public imagination, and American Marconi’s share price rocketed - which only served to emphasise that wireless was being controlled by an essentially foreign company. And some American Marconi operators were accused of encouraging Bride and Cottam to hold back their story when they might have given details from the
Carpathia.
The
New York Herald
discovered three marconiograms sent by W.T. Sammis, chief engineer of the American Marconi Company, to the operators on board the
Carpathia
. The first read: ‘Keep your mouth shut. Hold story. Big money for you.’ The second: ‘If you are wise, hold story. The Marconi Company will take care of you.’ And the third implicated Marconi himself in what the
Herald
and many politicians regarded as an unjustifiable news ‘blackout’ to further the company’s own ends: ‘Stop. Say nothing. Hold your story for dollars in four figures. Mr. Marconi agreeing. Will meet you at dock.’ Marconi denied any involvement, while Sammis admitted he had sent the messages,
but not until the
Carpathia
was near to docking in New York. Bride and Cottam did sell their exclusive stories to the
New York Times
for $1000 and $750 respectively, a fortune for young men earning the equivalent in pounds sterling of $360 a year.
This did not stop the Americans from treating the Marconi operators as honoured guests. Harold Bride was regarded as a hero by most of the newspapers, just as Jack Binns of the
Republic
had been. Jack Phillips, who had been buried at sea, was commemorated by statues in both America and his native England. Wireless had saved the lives of over seven hundred passengers on the
Titanic
, but the panic that followed the first news that the liner had hit an iceberg, and the chaotic whispering gallery of the airwaves over the following three days, finally drove the US government to seek to take control of this new technology. The owners of the
Titanic
were given a rough ride in Senate hearings to establish the cause of the disaster in which more than 1500 people perished, and Marconi himself was asked to explain and justify the behaviour of his American operators and managers. But the real scapegoats were the American wireless hams, many of them teenage boys, who were held responsible for much of the confusion about what had really happened on the night of 14 April.
Since 1909 several Bills had been introduced in the US Senate to regulate the amateurs. Boys as young as twelve had successfully argued against some of the proposals. The American Marconi Company had championed them, arguing forcefully that the real problem was the amateurism of the Navy and rival companies that had not got to grips with tuning. The boys who had built their own equipment were also potential recruits for the Marconi Company as it expanded and took on more and more operators. But after the
Titanic
’s sinking, though no amateur was ever found to have sent a misleading message, the Marconi Company quietly bowed to political pressure, and no longer opposed the regulation of amateurs.
Within months of the disaster all US amateurs were required to pass an examination before they could take out one of the newly
issued licences. They were tested on their knowledge of Continental Morse code, and had to show that they could take apart and reassemble a small station. A great many just kept their heads down and did not bother to apply for licences. Of those who did, the vast majority passed the tests easily, and were amused that their examiners were drawn from the US Navy, whose operators they regarded as a joke.